Romona tilted her head. “Trade?”
“Shoes for the human.”
Romona glanced at the woman and said, “She’s nearly gone anyway. Yes.” She held out her hands. “Shoes. Mine.” Then she pointed at the black boot on the ground. “Mine too.”
“Yes,” Mayhew said, bloody tears on both cheeks. “Yours too.”
“Acceptable to me.” And Romona smiled, a nearly human expression, full of delight and a winsome mischievousness.
Jane pulled two silver stakes from her hair and nodded at Liz. She and Cia sat on the cold ground just outside the hedge of thorns. They buried their hands in the chilled soil and Cia said, “From blood and death and moon above, release.” Everything happened so fast, like photos that overlaid one another, shuffled in a strong hand. The hedge fell.
Romona leaped. Jane whirled the stakes out in dual backswings. Cia and Liz rolled out of the way. Romona landed on Mayhew, thrusting him back. Jane stepped across the falling bodies, her hands coming together and down, like a scissors closing. The stakes slammed through Romona. A shriek sounded, so piercing it was deafening. A death keening. Cia and Liz covered their ears in shock. Blood fountained up over Jane’s hands.
The keening shut off. Jane pulled the dead vampire away from her husband. He was sobbing, his anguish human and pitiable. Two other vamps reattached his shackles as Jane hefted the dead vampire to her shoulder and carried the body into the dark. Mayhew raised his face to the night sky and screamed his grief. The sound of a blade chopping echoed. Once. Twice.
Dacy knelt over the limp body of Evelyn McMann, a small knife in her hand. With an economical motion and no flinching at all, she sliced her own wrist and placed it at Evelyn’s mouth. The blood trickled in, and Dacy held Evelyn’s jaw until the human woman swallowed. Liz and Cia stood in the cold wind, arms around each other for warmth and comfort, watching the second-most-powerful vampire in Asheville healing their enemy’s mother. Evelyn reached up with two skeletal hands and gripped Dacy’s wrist. The vampire looked at them and said, “She will live. Your word, if you please.”
“We’ll never speak of this to anyone without your permission,” Cia said.
“We’ll never speak of this to anyone unless it means the life of another,” Liz amended.
“Acceptable,” Lincoln Shaddock said. Dacy picked Evelyn up like she was a baby and started for the cars.
Moments later Jane came back, from a different direction. There was blood on her white shirt. “We’re done,” she said. “The policing of Lincoln Shaddock for his clan is acceptable to Leo Pellissier, the Master of the City of New Orleans and most of the Southeast United States, including the Appalachian Mountains where we stand. Pay the Everharts.” She pointed to Cia and Liz.
Lincoln Shaddock removed an envelope from his pocket and extended it. Cia accepted it. The twins gathered up their belongings and raced to their car to find Evelyn asleep in the backseat. They were halfway down the mountain before they caught their breath. “That was wicked weird,” Cia said.
“Yeah. Let’s get Evelyn back to Layla and start studying up on how to get purified before the blood magics sink too deep.”
“Yeah. Good plan.” Cia tore open Lincoln Shaddock’s envelope and drew in a slow breath.
“How much?”
“A hundred thousand dollars. Combined with Evie’s estate, I think we just made enough money to put a huge down payment on a house, sister mine.” They started to giggle. Neither of them said anything about the hysterical edge to their laughter, or what it hid. Not yet.
—
When the twins left the elegant house in the Montford Historic District, Layla—sans makeup and wearing old jeans—was crying and hugging her mother, having wrapped her in a blanket in the middle of her bed. She was force-feeding her water and Gatorade and cucumber sandwiches.
“Like, who keeps cucumber sandwiches on hand?” Cia said as they walked out of the house.
“People who don’t know the value of leftover homemade soup and yeast bread from Seven Sassy Sisters.”
Cia said, “Oh, yeah. We eat, and then we figure out how to get the blood magics off us.”
“Done.” Liz took a slow breath. Her lungs and ribs didn’t hurt, not at all. She didn’t want to say the words, but couldn’t keep them in. “Jane Yellowrock might have saved our lives. If Romona had gotten free and drawn on the blood magic of the mountain . . .”
“Yeah.” Cia’s tone was grudging. “We’d have been her dinner.”
The silence after her words stretched, as the sisters got in the car and drove away. Cia finally said, “When you had the rock on you, the rock Evangelina threw at you when she was trying to kill us all? I tried to push it off. I couldn’t. It was too heavy. You weren’t breathing. Like, at all. Jane—in her cat form—pushed it off. She saved you. I think she saved Carmen that day, too. And she did what we couldn’t when she . . . ” Cia heaved a breath that seemed to hurt. “When she took care of Evie, too.”